Back to Marathon Training: Week 6 of 22

It was VERY hard to go running tonight. It was dark, cold and rainy. And since I decided I won't do a single run on a treadmill anymore in my life (this will be the subject of a separate post), I had to face the weather, it will get worse as the end of year approaches. Friends helped a lot today and I thank them for this, it was very much appreciated!

The run itself was difficult, I feel like the 10 days in Brazil helped me a lot to get out of shape. Good food, good weather, then food poisoning and rain and gastritis. That was hell.

I did 10 sprints of 1min each today, 2 minutes of recovery, on the last 2 I walked to recover but was able to keep a good sprint pace in all of them. I am satisfied with the results.

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I went to Philadelphia this past Friday for a conference on mobile trends and had this fantastic opportunity to do my tempo run along the Schuylkill river, just "behind" the Philadelphia Museum of Art where the movie Rocky was once shot. It was a fantastic ride, very cold evening but this didn't prevent me - and some other people - to enjoy a good run along the river and the night scenery.

I decided I will now post a picture of what I see at the beginning of my runs. This is the Philadelphia City Hall as seen from Broad St.

After 2 miles of warm-up (literally as I was freezing), I ran 3 miles at my tempo pace (8:22 min/mi or 5:12 min/km). The average of the three miles was actually faster: 8:14min/mi or 5:07min/km which made me very happy because it wasn't exhaustive at all.

Look forward to my long run this Sunday in Manhattan, it's going to be something between 9 and 10 miles.

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It was very cold this morning when I decided to go running for my long run. Actually it was already noon, I was waiting for the weather to get a bit warmer. When I left home it was 32F (0C) but I geared up and off I went. I started my run near Grand Central and the plan was to go up 1st avenue and then to Central Park for the big loop, since this will be part of my "Manhattan Marathon". You gotta get used to the running course! ;)

Garmin lost the GPS lock during the course and I nearly lost 10 minutes of data recording, but hopefully I had my iPhone and "runens" app on. Runens is a project I am doing on the side, I will be sharing more info about it soon. So, instead of running 9 miles, I ended up running 10.6, also because I wanted to complete the Central Park big loop. It was a fantastic run even though the park wasn't really filled with many runners, probably because of the weather. I could sense empathy between everyone who was there running, this is something only runners can understand, real runners face the weather and run on the streets, no matter what. And they always give their best.

My average pace should've been PMP+20sec/mile or 9:06min/mile, but I ended up doing 8:45 min/mile, which is actually my PMP. This is great, but again when you are running faster than you should, you must pay double attention to the signals your body give to you. At the very first sign of overuse you should slow down or even stop. Hopefully I had the feeling I could've gone for more miles.

I feel like I recovered from the bad two weeks of training in Brazil and this makes me very happy.I am over 100 miles since I started this Marathon Training.

When you are a long distance runner in NYC, it does not matter where you live, Central Park is always nearby.